Clarification of details of ISM talk last night

We got an e-mail from Joe who gave the talk, and I thought I’d just post it straight up here:

thanks again for inviting ISM down to speak yesterday, I had a look at the blog you guys are keeping of the sit in and there were just a couple of issues i have about the summary of my talk, sorry if the talk wasnt that clear, ive been pretty exhausted and a bit ill recently.

Joe Lee (ISM): talk on the historical context of the Israeli occupation”
The talk was on the whole history of the Israel Palestine conflict, not just the occupation, which has only been going on for just over 40 years.

With regards to “Israel’s policy has always been essentially Zionist, in the sense of explicitly aiming to displace the Palestinians from what is now the Occupied Territories” The point I was making was that population transfer, or ethnic cleansing was kind of inherant in zionism despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, at least amongst zionist leaders. Israel
didnt exist before 1948, but pre-israeli state zionists carried out that cleansing, and the idea of transfer carried on into the occupation during the time Israel existed as a state.

“notes that the Palestinians (in this case, represented by Hamas) aren’t rejectionist” I wasnt saying no Palestinians are rejectionist, of course some Palestinians are, I mentioned Islamic Jihad as one rejectionist group. My point was that Hamas itself, or at least the leadership of Hamas, de facto accepts the two state solution, which means it is not rejectionist whether or not it has officially recognised Israel. I was comparing this with the offical policy of te Israeli government and the US, which is demonstrably rejectionist.